good afternoon,
upon reading prov-aq with the goal to implement access to provenance
information for repositories in the dydra triple store, i observe
inconsistent intentions with respect to that document's role in the
specification. the document suggests, that it is intended to become a
recommendation, while the overview states, that prov-aq is to be
published as a note. should the latter be the true intent, some of
the its exposition should be removed to a normative document before
they are final. implementors will not be well-served if prov-aq
remains a note, but is written in terms of concepts which are
introduced there, without mention in either prov-o or prov-dm.
in "1.1 Concepts", the term "constrained resource" appears, with
reference to prov-dm and to webarch, but the term fails to appear in
either of those documents. the latter absence does not surprise. but
one would expect it to have been introduced and defined in some other
prov document which is more central than a "note". the same
situation applies to "target-uri".
in "1.2 Provenance and resources" the concepts are sufficiently
central to the notion of provenance, that a reader could expect the
passage to have appeared, for example, in prov-dm, section 2.1 rather
than prov-aq. central concepts should be defined completely in a
nomative document - for example, some combination of -o and -dm, with
the -aq document restricted to how access is to be provided to
already defined entities. as the documents stand, the reader must
rely on the content of a non-normative note for their understanding
of basic concepts required to implement access to provenance
information.
the document would be improved, if some diagram were present to
illustrate how the respective entities are made available in a
concrete case by a service - or by distinct services, which afford
access to versioned and or derived resources and respective
provenance information.
in section 3, the paragraph which begins "we start by" includes a
list which describes three situations regarding the requester's
knowledge of a resource uri. it is not evident, which "resource uri"
is here the object? is it the provenance, the service, a target, or
the about resource itself?
from appendix b, the several terms which are to be added to the prov
namespace, should appear in a normative document, rather than in a
note: hasProvenance, hasProvenanceService, hasAnchor,
ProvenanceService, and provenanceUriTemplate.
best regards, from berlin,
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james anderson | james@datagraph.org | james@dydra.com | http://
dydra.com